What is standboy?

Standboy is a VS Code and Cursor extension that turns the wait time during AI coding agent runs into something more fun than staring at a spinner. It adds a small Game Boy emulator to your editor's sidebar. When your agent starts working, the panel pops open and the Game Boy wakes up. When the agent finishes, it tucks itself back down and pauses exactly where you left off. The idea behind it is simple: waiting on an agent often means switching to Twitter or Slack and losing ten minutes before you notice the work is done. Standboy gives you something to glance at without leaving your editor, with a hard stop built in once the agent finishes. It connects to Cursor's built in agent and to Claude Code through their official lifecycle hooks, so it knows precisely when an agent starts and stops rather than guessing from editing patterns. For other agents it falls back to watching for bursts of file edits instead. You load your own Game Boy, Game Boy Color, or Game Boy Advance ROM files from disk. Standboy does not bundle or link to any games. Loaded ROMs get copied into a small library on your machine, matched against a bundled database by their file signature so the library shows real cover art and titles, and your save data is kept and restored automatically between sessions. Other touches include five built in color palettes plus a custom option, fully rebindable keyboard controls for the D-pad and action buttons, and no telemetry beyond a one time cover art lookup per game, which is cached locally afterward. The extension is released under the MIT license, so it can be used, modified, and redistributed freely as long as the copyright notice is kept.